1.6 cents to make a 1 cent coin. Big deal, think how often they are used. I got two pennies in my change from lunch today: 1978 and 1964. How many transactions has each one seen? As silly as the people in the U.S. who resist a change to dollar coins because "it costs more to make a coin than to print on paper."

The Australian Government is currently holding an inquiry into legalising same-sex marriage. The Catholic church isn't very happy about this and is sending a letter about "The True Meaning of Marriage" to 80,000 of their parishioners.

It actually makes a fairly logical argument, if you accept the base premise that marriage is "a natural institution" - which even a brief glance at the scope of human history and culture shows is absolute crazy talk.

Also, this - [Opposition to Same Sex Marriage] in no way implies that the Church accepts discrimination against other’s human rights. Nor does it mean we fail to understand the complex nature of human sexual identity and desire. It implies no lack of respect for people who identify as ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’.

Now Schweller wants to go one step further and outfit the bonobos with wireless tablets running custom Bonobo Chat software, allowing the apes to communicate with their keepers (and other bonobos!) from anywhere in the Sanctuary, and to remotely control devices such as vending machines, doors, and the RoboBonobo.

“Weird Al” Yankovic, the frizzy-haired parody singer best known for his 1980s musical send-offs of stars such as Michael Jackson and Milli Vanilli, filed suit this afternoon against Sony Music Entertainment, claiming the record label has deliberately underpaid him more than $5 million.

Filed today in federal court in New York, Yankovic’s suit is the latest in a growing list of looming court battles between artists and the nation’s major record labels over accounting and payment practices for music sold and streamed online.

Nutraloaf is perhaps the most reviled food in the nation. It's a meatloaf-like substance designed to meet a prisoner's nutritional needs, and is often composed of leftover fruits, vegetables, meats and grains. It's bad-tasting and is often used as a form of punishment.

Terrance Prude, who is usually housed at a Wisconsin state prison, was moved to the county jail on several occasions for the purpose of attending court proceedings. During his second and third stays, he was fed nutraloaf, explains the court. The food caused him to lose 12 pounds even though he was not overweight. It also caused him to vomit and experience severe gastrointestinal pain.

The county jail gave him antacids and a stool softener and sent him back to the state prison. Once there, he was diagnosed with an anal fissure, which Judge Posner explains is "no fun at all."

Dotsies is a font that uses dots instead of letters. The latin alphabet (abc...) was created thousands of years ago, and is optimized for writing, not reading. About time for an update, no? Dotsies is optimized for reading. The letters in each word smoosh together, so words look like shapes.

The chemical engineer claimed to have overseen the building of a mobile biological laboratory when he sought political asylum in Germany in 1999. His lies were presented as "facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence" by Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, when making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003.

But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true. When it is put to him "we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie", he simply replies: "Yes."

US officials "sexed up" Mr Janabi's drawings of mobile biological weapons labs to make them more presentable, admits Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Powell's former chief of staff. "I brought the White House team in to do the graphics," he says, adding how "intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy".

What I don't get is how they're apparently picking up coins with an electromagnet in the pictures... colour me ignorant but aren't coins generally copper/nickel alloys, while magnets only attract iron?